Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-5b777bbd6c-7mr9c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-06-21T21:25:44.573Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 1 - The Challenges of Conceptualizing Social Problems

from Part I - General Concerns and Orientations in the Study of Social Problems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 March 2018

By
Joseph Schneider
Edited by
A. Javier Treviño
A. Javier Treviño
Affiliation:
Wheaton College, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

The sociological study of social problems is reviewed in terms of the question of conceptualizing the key term social problems as a technical term in the discipline and beyond. Dilemmas brought by the very word problem, by who uses it and how, are considered. Against a dominant tradition of the sociologist using the term normatively, elements of the definitional approach proposed by Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse are reviewed as the most analytically sound conceptualization of the last century, still offering promise. That argument is then linked to work in science studies and the respecification of sociology by Bruno Latour to suggest a revitalized study of social problems and sociology.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems , pp. 3 - 22
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adorjan, Michael C. 2013. Igniting constructionist imaginations: Social constructionism's absence and potential contribution to public sociology. The American Sociologist 44:1–22.Google Scholar
Alaimo, Stracy, and Hekman, Susan, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Howard S. 1967. Whose side are we on? Social Problems 14:239–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behar, Katherine, ed. 2016. Object-Oriented Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Best, Joel. 1993. But seriously folks: The limitations of the strict constructionist interpretation of social problems. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by Holstein, James A. and Gubrium, Jaber F., 129–47. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Bryant, Levi, Srnicek, Nick, and Harman, Graham, eds. 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press.Google Scholar
Burawoy, Michael, Gamson, William, Ryan, Charlotte, Pfohl, Stephen, Vaughn, Diane, Derber, Charles, and Schor, Juliet. 2004. Public Sociologies: A symposium from Boston College. Social Problems 51:103–30.Google Scholar
Burawoy, Michael, Gamson, William, Ryan, Charlotte, Pfohl, Stephen, Vaughn, Diane, Derber, Charles, and Schor, Juliet. 2005a. For public sociology. American Sociological Review 70:4–28.Google Scholar
Burawoy, Michael, Gamson, William, Ryan, Charlotte, Pfohl, Stephen, Vaughn, Diane, Derber, Charles, and Schor, Juliet. 2005b. The return of the repressed: Recovering the public face of U.S. sociology, one hundred years on. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 600:68–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calhoun, Craig J., ed. 2007a. Sociology in America: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Craig J., 2007b. Sociology in America: An introduction. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Calhoun, Craig J., 1–38. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Case, Clarence. 1924. What is a social problem? Journal of Applied Sociology 8:268–73.Google Scholar
Clifford, James, and Marcus, Steven, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 1994. Feminist Thought: Desire, Power, and Academic Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 2007. Introduction. In The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Clough, Patricia Ticineto, 1–33. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2007. Pushing the boundaries or business as usual? Race, class, and gender studies and sociological inquiry. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Calhoun, Craig J., 572–604. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Coole, Diana, and Frost, Samantha. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Gordon, Colin. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. (1978) 1991. Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Burchell, G., Gordon, C, and Miller, P, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Fuller, Richard, and Myers, Richard. 1941. Some aspects of a theory of social problems. American Sociological Review 6: 24–32.Google Scholar
Gubrium, Jaber F., and Holstein, James A.. 2012. Don't argue with the members. The American Sociologist 43:85–98.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 1994. A game of cat's cradle: Science studies, feminist studies, cultural studies. Configurations: A Journal of Literature and Science 1:59–71.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan ©_Meets_Oncomouse™. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. 2000. How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1992. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court.Google Scholar
Hartmann, Douglas. Forthcoming. Rethinking sociology and its publics: The next generation. The Sociological Quarterly.Google Scholar
Hewitt, John M., and Hall, Peter. 1973. Social problems, problematic situations, and quasi-theories. American Sociological Review 38:367–75.Google Scholar
Holstein, James A., and Gubrium, Jaber F, eds. 2008. Handbook of Constructionist Research. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Holstein, James A., and Miller, Gale, eds. 1993. Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ibarra, Peter R. 2008. Strict and contextual constructionism in the sociology of deviance and social problems. In Handbook of Constructionist Research, edited by Holstein, James A. and Gubrium, Jaber F., 355–69. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Ibarra, Peter R., and Kitsuse, John I.. 1993. Vernacular constituents of moral discourse: An interactionist proposal for the study of social problems. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by Holstein, James A. and Miller, Gale, 25–58. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2003. The promises of constructivism. In Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, edited by Ihde, Don and Selinger, E, 27–46. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30:225–48.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Latour, Bruno, and Woolgar, Steve. (1979) 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lynch, Michael. 2005. Social studies of science. In Encyclopedia of Social Theory, edited by Ritzer, George, 760–64. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Lynch, Michael. 2008. Ethnomethodology as a provocation to constructionism. In Handbook of Constructionist Research, edited by Holstein, James A and Gubrium, Jaber F, 715–32. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Manza, Jeff, and McCarthy, Michael A. 2011. The neo-Marxist legacy in American sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 37:155–83.Google Scholar
Maynard, Douglas W. 1988. Language, interaction, and social problems. Social Problems 35:311–34.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K., and Nisbet, Robert, eds. 1971. Contemporary Social Problems. New York: Harcourt.Google Scholar
Miller, JoAnn. 2011. Social justice work: Purpose-driven social science. Social Problems 58:1–20.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright. 1940. Situated actions and vocabularies of motive. American Sociological Review 5:904–13.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright. 1943. The professional ideology of social pathologists. American Journal of Sociology 49:165–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pollner, Melvin. 1967. Sociological and common-sense models of the labeling process. In Ethnomethodology, edited by Turner, Ralph, 27–40. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.Google Scholar
Pollner, Melvin. 1987. Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pollner, Melvin. 2012. The end(s) of ethnomethodology. The American Sociologist 43:7–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel. 2005. On complainability. Social Problems 52:449–76.Google Scholar
Schneider, Joseph. 1985. Social problems theory: The constructionist view. Annual Review of Sociology 11:209–29.Google Scholar
Schneider, Joseph. 1993. “Members only”: Reading the constructionist text. In Reconsidering Social Constructionism: Debates in Social Problems Theory, edited by Holstein, James A. and Miller, Gale, 103–16. New York: Aldine De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Schneider, Joseph. 2005. Donna Haraway: Live Theory. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Schneider, Joseph. 2008. Saving social construction: Contributions from cultural studies. In Handbook of Constructionist Research, edited by Holstein, James A. and Gubrium, Jaber F., 733–52. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Schneider, Joseph. 2009. Off the sidelines and onto the court! Figuring a modestly radical subject of knowledge in the work of John I. Kitsuse. The American Sociologist 40:38–50.Google Scholar
Schneider, Joseph. 2015. The medicalization of deviance: From badness to sickness. In Handbook on Sociology of Deviance, edited by Goode, Erich, 137–54. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Schneider, Joseph, and Kitsuse, John I., eds. 1984. Advances in the Sociology of Social Problems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Shaviro, Steven. 2009. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Shaviro, Steven. 2014. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Spector, Malcolm, and Kitsuse, John I. (1977) 2000. Constructing Social Problems. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press.Google Scholar
Starn, Orin, ed. 2015. Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Stocking, George, ed. 1983. Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Treviño, A. Javier. 2012. The challenge of service sociology. Social Problems 59:2–20.Google Scholar
Waller, Willard. 1936. Social problems and the mores. American Sociological Review 1:922–34.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) 1978. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition, edited by Griffin, David R. and Sherburne, Donald W. New York: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Winant, Howard. 2007. The dark side of the force: One hundred years of the sociology of race. In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Calhoun, Craig J., 535–71. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Woolgar, Steve, and Pawluch, Dorothy. 1985. Ontological gerrymandering: The anatomy of social problems explanations. Social Problems 32:214–27.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Don H. 2005. Introduction: Conversation analysis and social problems. Social Problems 52:445–48.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×